Joseph Deighton Gibson Jr.

Joseph Deighton Gibson Jr. (May 13, 1920 – January 30, 2000) was an American radio disc jockey and actor.

Benson, the ‘Old Swingmaster’ (born Arthur Bernard Leaner in 1920 in Jackson, Mississippi) as he was known, had come to radio in 1943 as a pastor, but was prohibited from selling airtime, so he switched to become a secular DJ, and mentored some of the Black DJ’s at WGES and WJJD.

He rapidly rose to fame in Chicago, Illinois, playing swing and Be-Bop jazz.

His phenomenal appeal was due to the Black jive talk he peppered between songs.

He was the first DJ to speak with a Black southern accent, and frequently used ‘street slang’.

He came to this by way of his previous employment with the Works Progress Administration as an interviewer.

His bond with the Black migrants to northern cities was from his ‘mushmouth,’ as the first Black radio ‘personality jock.’ He was the first to play hit urban blues records on air, and with success at selling airtime, the station became immensely popular.

When Jack Gibson came to work for him at WJJD a bell rang, and thus was born the idea of Black appeal radio.

'Jockey Jack' was born here.

In publicity stills, Gibson was pictured straddling a microphone and turntable in jockey silk outfits, and he gained a following playing to a Black audience.

Also he had parts in the anthology Destination Freedom, a series written by Richard Durham, dedicated to the retelling the lives of notable Negros in the Americas.

He attended Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, from 1940 to 1942, earning a bachelor's degree in science.

He is regarded as the father of the Black appeal radio format.

To his peers in radio his nickname was “Jockey Jack,” and he achieved renown for his annual Black radio convention, where he was known as Jack the Rapper, for an all-inclusive Black/urban music showcase and convention.

He is listed in the Nevada Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame.

—Doctor Hep Cat, KVET Austin, 1948

In 1949, Gibson left WJJD to found a new station, WERD in Atlanta, Georgia.

WERD was the first radio station to be owned by a Black person, and the first voice heard on it was ‘Jockey Jack.’ He and Jesse Blayton Jr. flipped the switch on a money-losing big-band station.

The station played the new Rhythm and Blues (R&B)—a mix of gospel vocal styles, swing-band instrumentals, and electrified urban blues which Benson had helped to popularize after WWII.

R&B was outselling jazz in the Black music market but had little traction on-air as DJs at other Black-themed stations did not play it, preferring the then-popular big-band format.

The use of ‘back home’ street patter and R&B music was popular with the youth culture and was considered ‘gangsta’ and a bit obscene.

Along with other Benson-inspired DJ’s, a new wave of rhyming and signifying African-American culture hit American urban centers on air, with boastful patter, the ‘dozens,’ and rhyming at the end of sentences which became de jure.

The first to do that was a former Negro League baseball announcer named Lavada Durst, known as Doctor Hep Cat, who spieled rhyme that was not obscene and was the precursor to modern rap and hip-hop.

There was also Holmes (Daddy-O) Daylie, the rapping bartender who did his entire show in rhyme.

Daddy-O was responsible for the Be-Bop revolution in jazz vernacular, creating a hipster idiom that Be-Bop artist Dizzy Gillespie credits for popularizing with modern jazz lovers in the 1950s and 1960s.

Jumpin’ jills and jivin' cats,

Upstate Gates in Stetson hats,

Lace your boots and tighten your wig,

Here’s some jive, can you dig?

I'm Doctor Hep Cat, on the scene,

With a stack of shellac in my record machine,

I'm hip to the tip, and bop to the top,

I'm long time coming and I just won't stop.

Durst published a pamphlet called “The Jives of Doctor Hep Cat” which included his radio rhymes and a dictionary of “jive talk.” For much of the 1950s and well into the 1960s Doctor Hep Cat ruled the late-night in Austin, Texas.

These DJs did not assimilate the culture; they were populists, broadcasting music and speech that Black folk used in the street.

This set the stage for the birth of Black appeal radio stations in the post-war era of swing and Be-Bop.

When Hal Jackson (Inner City Broadcasting Corporation head) entered mass-market radio he put his own stamp on Black radio, one that eschewed fast-talking jive, and with WWRL he found greater audiences broadcasting in the smoother patter of the inner city.

When his station WLIB purchased WBLS and FM radio audiences came to understand there was more to music than top-40, disc jockeys like Frankie Crocker and his urban contemporary cohorts Johnny 'The Duke' Allen, Vaughn 'Quiet Storm' Harper, and Ken ‘Spider’ Webb went from just some ‘jive turkeys’ to number one in their market, then to the number-one radio station in the country.

In 1989, he was inducted into the Black Radio Hall of Fame.

Gibson began his career in radio under the wing of Al Benson, one of radio’s legends, a jive-patter-talking disc jockey (DJ) of the Be-Bop school at Chicago’s WJJD.